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By James Barron
Mohammed Uddin was having a bad day, and it was only lunchtime. He was fourth in line at a green-taxi stand in Astoria, Queens, and not happy about it.
But he was not waiting for a green cab to pull up. He was in a line of green cabs waiting for passengers to pick up in the shadow of the Astoria Boulevard subway station.
“I started at 9 o’clock,” said Mr. Uddin, a green-taxi driver since he left a hotel job on Long Island in 2014. “I made $47 so far. That’s very bad. If Uber hadn’t come in, it wouldn’t be like this.”
Uber and Lyft, the ride-share services that have transformed the way many New Yorkers get around, have plunged the yellow cab industry into an existential crisis. But green-cab drivers are no less angry about app-connected rides, saying that Uber and Lyft have torpedoed their fledgling segment of the taxi industry before it even had a chance to establish itself.
Mayor Bill de Blasio recently signed a bill into law that capped ride-share vehicles at their current level, around 100,000, making it the first major American city to impose a limit on the booming industry. But drivers like Mr. Uddin said the cap was unlikely to create a new window of opportunity for green cabs, in part because ride-hail cars outnumber green cabs 30 to 1. City officials estimate the number of green cabs on city streets to be around 3,500.
The city wanted green taxis to be an antidote to a longstanding problem: Yellow cabs rarely pick up people outside Manhattan, except at the airports. But their arrival more or less coincided with the rise of Uber, which, after establishing itself in Manhattan, expanded across the city.
“Uber and Lyft really decimated the green cab sector,” said Bhairavi Desai, the executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which represents taxi and ride-hail drivers. “There was high expectation among drivers that this would be an opportunity to earn without the same level of pressure that you face in the yellow-cab industry.”
Uber counters that it helps green cabs, because many green-taxi operators also drive for Uber. An Uber spokesman said the ride-hail service dispatches more than 50,000 trips to green taxis every month — of course, for passengers, it can be confusing to order an Uber car and have a green taxi pull up to the curb. The Uber spokesman, Jason Post, said Uber provided “an enormous earning opportunity by connecting drivers with more rides,” especially in far-flung neighborhoods where fewer green cabs circulate looking for passengers.
Uber riders say it is often much easier and faster to get an Uber car with a couple of taps on a cellphone than to it is to look for a green cab to hail on the street.
Figures from the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission underscore how much business for green cabs has declined since ride-share cars arrived. In May, green taxis made 25,693 trips a day across the city, a 55 percent decrease from May 2015, the busiest month on record, which had 57,637 trips. By contrast, Uber says it handled more than 84,000 trips to or from a single neighborhood, East New York, Brooklyn, between July 18 and Aug. 15.
For green cabs, revenue has declined proportionally as trips have dwindled, to $386,965 a day citywide in May 2018, from $862,099 in May 2015. Green-cab drivers are working less than they were, 5.7 hours in May 2018, compared with 6.5 hours in May 2015.
Brooklyn accounted for a third of green-cab pickups from January through May of this year, according to the taxi commission. Almost another third, 31 percent, were in northern Manhattan, and 29.5 percent were in Queens. By contrast, only 5.3 percent were in the Bronx, and only one one-hundredth of one percent on Staten Island.
And, while the number of ride-hail vehicles has soared, the number of green cabs has shrunk. A total of 8,345 permits have been issued since 2013, but the taxi commission considers only 3,514 active.
As for whether Uber had hurt the green cabs, Mr. Post, the Uber spokesman, said, “I would say Uber has built a better mousetrap.”
Green taxis were supposed to be that mousetrap — a new category for the entrenched taxi industry, created when Michael R. Bloomberg was mayor. “The right to hail a legal taxi in all five boroughs,” he said in 2013, was “something that New Yorkers have deserved and never had.” A survey by the taxi commission found that 95 percent of yellow taxis picked up passengers below 96th Street in Manhattan and at the airports.
The solution — taxis that could only operate away from the areas dominated by yellow cabs — now seems so 2011, which is when the Bloomberg administration first proposed it. The new category of taxis that was created, the green cabs, could not pick up passengers in Manhattan south of East 96th Street or West 110th Street. They can stop if someone hails them anywhere in the other boroughs, except at the airports.
By coincidence, 2011 is also when Uber began operating in New York.
Now, some passengers say green cabs tried, but never fulfilled their promise.
“They filled a crucial void in areas like Harlem where yellow cab service was spotty at best” when they first hit the streets, said Derek Q. Johnson, who lives in Harlem. “But I think it’s hard to dispute that the ride is better with Uber and Lyft and the reliability is more assured.”
Different rules apply to green cabs at airports, where they can drop off passengers but cannot pick them up, except by prearrangement — for example, if they are sent there by a dispatcher. Many drivers complain that those rules force them to go to the airports empty if they are dispatched for a pickup or return empty if they take someone there. Unlike yellow cabs, they cannot wait in the taxi lines. Uber and the other ride-hailing apps are not bound by airport rules.
The yellow-cab industry responded to the plan for green cabs by going to court. Yellow cab owners worried that the value of their million-dollar medallions would plummet.
The city won the court challenge and the value plummeted, but not because of competition from the green cabs that went on the streets in 2013.
“Unfortunately, they came along at the same time as Uber and Lyft,” said Mitchell L. Moss, a professor at New York University where he is the director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management. “The benefit of Uber is it can come pick you up in highly dispersed locations, which the green taxi can’t really do because it’s got to stay near dense transit pickup locations.”
Green cabs, he said, are “basically clustering at transit and retail hubs” — near where subway lines end, for example — because they are more likely to find passengers there than if they cruise the streets they are authorized to cruise where people are not used to seeing cabs. Indeed, Ms. Desai, of the Taxi Workers Alliance, said that “significant street-hail markets” had not developed outside Manhattan.
But that was not the only problem for green cabs. “The city was kind of undercutting them by licensing all those other cars” — the ride-share vehicles, said Graham Hodges, a historian of the taxi industry and a professor at Colgate University, who predicted that a shakeout is coming.
“There are far too many vehicles on the road, and that’s where I think the T.L.C. will tighten up regulation,” he said, referring to the taxi commission. “And when they do, the ones with those permits will be in the best legal situation. They’ll be the ones that survive.”
Copyright 2018 The New York Times Company.  All rights reserved.

Most Tenants Facing Foreclosure Now Have Some Protection, at Least for 90 Days

On May 24, 2018 a permanent extension of the “Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act” (PTFA) was signed into federal law.  The PTFA enables renters whose homes were in foreclosure to remain in their homes for at least 90 days or for the term of their lease, whichever is greater.

The PTFA, enacted in 2009 and originally expired at the end of 2014, was the only federal protection for renters living in foreclosed properties. During the financial crisis, bad faith and fraudulent lending, coupled with falling home prices and high unemployment, resulted in an astronomical high number of foreclosures in the U.S.
Renters lose their homes when the owner of the home they are renting goes into foreclosure.
The impact of these foreclosures was not limited to homeowners, however; renters lose their homes every day when the owner of the home they are renting goes into foreclosure.  Unlike homeowners who know that a foreclosure is coming, renters are completely unaware.  Yet, they continued to pay rent while the homeowner was not paying their lenders.  Many renters can be evicted within a few days of the completion of the foreclosure.
The PTFA gives most renters at least to 90 days’ notice before being required to move after a foreclosure.

Under PTFA, tenants with Section 8 housing choice voucher assistance have additional protections allowing them to retain their Section 8 lease and requiring the successor-in-interest to assume the housing assistance payment contract associated with that lease.
The law applies in cases of both judicial and nonjudicial foreclosures.
The PTFA applies to all foreclosures on all residential properties; traditional one-unit single family homes are covered, as are multi-unit properties. Tenants with lease rights of any kind, including month-to-month leases or leases terminable at will, are protected as long as the tenancy is in effect as of the date of the completion of the foreclosure.
The PTFA applies in all states but does not override more protective state laws.  Read more…
For more information about the PTFA, see: https://bit.ly/2L55LbE

Some other articles: Protecting Tenants, Arizona law

The post Tenants Facing Foreclosure Protected by New Federal Law appeared first on Diane L. Drain - Phoenix Bankruptcy & Foreclosure Attorney.

The automatic stay of Bankruptcy Code section 362(a)(1) prohibits: “The commencement or continuation, including the issuance or employment of process, of a judicial, administrative, or other action of proceeding against the debtor that was or could have been commenced before the commencement of the case under this title, or to recover a claim against the Read More

by Herb Weisbaum

Credit card delinquencies on the rise. Despite a strong economy and low unemployment, Americans are falling behind in paying off their credit card debt.

The delinquency rate on all U.S. credit card loans is 2.47 percent — up from 2.42 percent at the beginning of 2017 and 2.12 percent in the second quarter of 2015, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

That means more than $23 billion in credit card debt is currently delinquent — 30 or more days overdue — according to a new report from the personal finance website NerdWallet.

While lack of money is the most common reason for missing a payment, forgetting to pay the bill is often the case. For its 2018 Consumer Credit Card Report, NerdWallet surveyed 2,019 U.S. adults and found that:

• 35 percent simply forgot to make the payment.
• 33 percent needed the money to pay for essentials.
• 32 percent needed the money for an unexpected expense.

Kim Palmer, NerdWallet’s credit card expert, finds it “troubling” that so many people — 65 percent of those surveyed — did not pay their bill on time because they didn’t have the money. According to NerdWallet’s most-recent Household Credit Card Debt Study, income growth isn’t keeping up with some of people’s biggest expenses. 

Reasons for credit card delinquencies

“People's budgets are really stretched because the cost of certain essentials, like healthcare, food and housing, continue to go up and really put pressure on people's budgets,” Palmer said. “And so, people are turning to credit cards as a way to bridge the gap when they can't afford their monthly bills and then they’re unable to make the payments at the end of the month.”

Nerdwallet’s report found that 25 percent of those who’ve been delinquent on a credit card payment said it was because they prioritized paying off other debt.

People's budgets are really stretched because the cost of certain essentials, like healthcare, food and housing, continue to go up and really put pressure on people's budgets.
Research by the Federal Reserve in 2017 found that when there’s not enough money to cover all monthly bills, credit card bills are more likely than other debt payments — rent or mortgage, car payment, or student loan — to go unpaid or partially unpaid.

The high cost of paying lateMore than one in five cardholders in the survey (21 percent) said they made a delinquent credit card payment sometime in their life. NerdWallet did the math: Using a late payment fee of $27, that’s more than $1.4 billion in penalty payments on a nationwide basis. And that’s on top of the interest charged for carrying a balance.

Adding insult to injury, falling more than 60 days behind can trigger what’s called the “penalty APR” which can be as high as 29.99 percent with some cards. That penalty APR, which makes it more expensive to carry that balance, can last for up to six months before the credit card company reviews your account to see if the rate should be lowered.

Let’s say you carry a balance of $3,000 on a card with a 15 percent interest rate and it takes you 18 months to pay off that balance. The Credit Card Payoff Calculator at Bankrate.com shows total interest will be $368. With a default rate of 29.99 percent, that jumps to $761, more than double the carrying cost.

Missing a payment can also decimate your credit score, because card issuers report delinquent accounts to the credit bureaus.

“The longer your account goes unpaid, the more damage you can do to your credit score and the more effort it will take to bring the account current,” said Bruce McClary, vice president for communications at the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC). “Once reported, a late payment could cause your credit score to drop more than 100 points in some situations.”

A poor credit score will make the cost of borrowing money more expensive and could result in being rejected for a mortgage or car loan. In some case, it could make it difficult or impossible to rent an apartment.

What you can doAll of these financial repercussions can be avoided with a more proactive approach, including:

• Use automatic bill pay
• Set up email and text reminders of upcoming due dates
• At least make the minimum payment to keep the account from going delinquent
• If your statement comes at the wrong time of month for you, contact the credit card company to see if the statement date can be changed.

When a late payment is unavoidable due to financial hardship, contact the credit card company before the due date to see if they can help you manage the situation. This would also be the time to get some expert guidance from a nonprofit credit counselor. You can find one near you on the NFCC website.
“Silence will only lead to setbacks,” McClary told NBC News BETTER. “Keeping your credit card balances under control and spending within your budget will go a long way toward protecting your credit health and your bottom line.”

Copyright 2018 NBC Universal.  All rights reserved.